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jawilson2

1,230 karma · joined August 21, 2012

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jawilson2··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
Yes, I know all of this. I have a Mac, and a PC, and an Arch Linux desktop, and an iPhone. None of the solutions are "easy." The task was "take a picture of a printed calendar with my phone and get it in my Apple Calendar (with zero intermediate steps)." This is not possible.
jawilson2··on Muse – Meta’s personal AI agent
Take a picture of my son's printed basketball calendar and add it to my shared iCloud family calendar. Apple/Siri couldn't do it, Claude couldn't do it. Things STILL can't talk to each other, seemingly intentionally. My wife and tried over the summer. I told her Claude+Siri could do this in 30s, and she would try by hand. 20 minutes later she was done adding each event manually, and I still couldn't get beyond trying to convince Calendar on my iPhone to open an ics or whatever file. I was supposed to open the file from Apple Mail, which I don't use, and email it from gmail or something.

This example should be "Super Friendly AI Assistant!!" and it fails on the absolute most basic thing I could throw at it.

jawilson2··on Navier-Stokes – Tristan Buckmaster [pdf]
> do people really think OpenAI is snooping at people specifically

yes.

Rules and laws are for the poor.

jawilson2··on 216M Spy TVs – The LG Smart TV Problem [video]
I want this data to be treated like HIPAA data. Any company that collects personal data must have a compliance officer, and any breaches should lead to people going to jail. If you collect personal data, you are personally responsible for it.
jawilson2··on Windows 11's "special" developer edition looks like another marketing misfire
> The surface area of stuff that an OS has to do today is absolutely massive

Why though? The OS should be the layer between hardware and applications/the user. Provide a GUI SDK+toolkit and a firewall. The OS should be responsible for a dozen different cloud sync bs things that I play whack-a-mole to disable anyway.

jawilson2··on Windows 11's "special" developer edition looks like another marketing misfire
2 of my kids play a total of 3 games: Fortnite, Rocket League, and Madden NFL. We're locked in for a while.
jawilson2··on Mom gets 6-month suspended sentence for letting 5-year-old walk to the pond
For sure. My youngest, who was 13 years old over the summer so a bit older, went on a few 25+mile bike rides on a nearby bike trail. He was gone for several hours, we just made sure he had plenty of water, sunscreen, and a reasonably full phone battery. This is in northern Chicago suburbs, Lake County. He absolutely loved the freedom, and we were able to periodically check is location. My MIL thought we were insane for letting him do this. She also thought we were insane for letting our oldest, a HS senior, do a 4 week summer course at USC in LA. He delighted in telling us about going off campus to play basketball, etc.
jawilson2··on GLP-1s are being linked to fewer serious infections, including TB
This was published in Nature, I'm pretty sure the reviewers understand and account for that. HN and reasonably educated people always think this is some huge gotcha, second only to "CORRELATION != CAUSATION!!!!"
jawilson2··on Wendell Berry has died
1. That link is blocked on my office network, so not sure how to respond.

2. I have enough attention thieves in my life to have to "work" to determine if I should read it.

jawilson2··on Wendell Berry has died
> HN never contextualizes obits

This is my biggest gripe with HN. You'll see a headline like "Norville Grub has died" and you look him up and he wrote a Unix timestamp parser in the 80's or something. This is pretty much the only time I wish we had moderators; it isn't that difficult to write "Norville Grub, original Unix timestamp parser author, has died". I pretty much skip every obit unless I recognize the name.

jawilson2··on USDA recalls 30k pounds of Argentine beef sold in Texas and Florida
You also have to remember that he probably also pocketed a massive bribe. Follow the grift.
jawilson2··on Dolly Parton has died
TBF, there are probably 100s of Dolly covers being done nightly. I just played Do I Ever Cross Your Mind a few nights ago with my bar band.
jawilson2··on Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown
You're missing the important part: doing all of this WITH A ONE YEAR OLD CRAWLING AROUND AT HOME. You can get things done, it is just an order of magnitude longer that it would take without kid(s).
jawilson2··on Pixel 11 Pro Fold feels like the end of an era
This is definitely a thing. I thought I was just getting old, but I am almost incapable of writing a word without mistyping now. It always registers neighboring letters.
jawilson2··on Being ambitious and being a dad
Intermittent fasting and calorie reduction are the only known way to EXTEND lifespan and wellness. 10 years of low carb + fasting is the single most important health decision I have ever made.
jawilson2··on They Killed Old Reddit
I stopped for me last week.
jawilson2··on Show HN: Today's cities on a globe of Earth's tectonic past and future
Very nice! I had to turn of the auto-rotate to get it to respond well to dragging.

I'm sure extrapolating to future movement was difficult, but starting today, and seeing the Baja peninsula rocket north through Alaska unphased was kind of funny.

jawilson2··on Should you wash your solar panels?
> €500 in furniture

I feel like this is 3/4 of a coffee table?

jawilson2··on Should you wash your solar panels?
None of those are "door knob, door knob, door knob!"
jawilson2··on Advertise in ChatGPT
'Google Is Censoring Reviews of ICE Detention Centers' - https://theintercept.com/2026/07/20/google-maps-reviews-ice-...

Yes, I have de-googled to the extent possible. I haven't used it for search in more than 3 years, I'm off all of their cloud products including gmail, and I don't use them for auth whenever possible. I'm 100% sure I've missed plenty, but I have to do SOMETHING about Techno-Feudal-Fascism.

jawilson2··on S&P Global has lowered Oracle’s creditworthiness from BBB to BBB-
I think he's saying that if one company panics or fails, all of the other AI companies will quickly pull out, and it will be a race to not be holding the hot potato at the end when the bubble bursts. Lots of analogies there! This is where we get the phrase "the stock market takes the stairs up and the elevator down". It crashes quickly and hard, and can be triggered by one event.
jawilson2··on What did SFFA vs. Harvard reveal about admissions?
> Personal tutoring for standardized tests has diminishing returns compared to just grinding...

Eh, not so sure. My son got a 32 on the ACT the first time he took it, and after 4 months of private tutoring got a 35, with 36 on math. Could he have grinded himself and got there? Possibly, but I doubt it. Having someone who knows what they're doing and holding him accountable was invaluable.

jawilson2··on What did SFFA vs. Harvard reveal about admissions?
This is going to screw me hard. I didn't make a meaningful income (>$95K) until I was 35, 10 years ago; I got a PhD, did a 4 year postdoc, and was an assistant non-tenure-track professor for 3 years. My monthly student loan payments were $1800/month. I changed jobs to HFT, and we have lived comfortably but not able to save much. I have 3 kids aged 17, 15, and 13, the oldest is applying to colleges very soon. 2 years ago I changed jobs again, and now make $700K on paper, but it is 60%+ bonuses, half of which is in a 3 year RSU. So, my take home pay is about $400K cash, taxed in a high bracket; I paid $145K or so in taxes this year. I have about $150K saved, $350K in 401K, and my mortgage is at $500K, with $300K to go. We are finally stable, e.g. we can take a vacation or 2, we can afford groceries without worrying, and can do travel baseball, but it also isn't an extravagant lifestyle or anything.

Now, this is a pretty phenomenal position to be in for most Americans, I can't complain too much. But, my oldest (white, straight, varsity basketball, 4.7 GPA, 35 ACT, 36 on Math) wants to go to a school like USC or Vanderbilt, and we will get 0 aid help. I refuse to let my kids suffer through student loans like my wife and I had to; at one point I made $2500/month as a postdoc, and $1800 went to loans while I had 2 kids under 2. My search history at that point was pretty grim, involving what circumstances life insurance would pay out, etc.

So, assuming all 3 kids go to a $100K/year type school, and we pay cash, that is $12 MILLION dollars over the next decade I will be paying (ignoring inflation, etc). This is the worst case, etc, but still bleak. And, apparently Stanford CS students can't get job offers, so they are entering a horrific job market. I don't think any college is worth that, not even Ivys, but not going to a good college is still worse. If I had a crystal ball 10-15 years ago, we would have left the country.

jawilson2··on Sam Neill has died
Same, I was born in '81, and JP is a cornerstone of my childhood, more-so than any other movie I can think of. I saw that movie at the theatre more than any other, at least 6 times that summer.

My favorite was at a drive-in in Kentucky. We used to rent boats at Lake Cumberland over the summer, and one night we watched JP at a drive-in. I remember the drive back to the dock late at night, driving through the woods, and imagining it was a Jurassic jungle. Then, back on the houseboat, going reading through my "Making of Jurassic Park" book with a battery operated book light.

jawilson2··on Write code like a human will maintain it
Yeah, agreed. These have started popping up a lot more recently, where I get a 5 sentence paragraph explaining how function overloading works in c++.
jawilson2··on Every new car sold in the European Union must include a driver monitoring camera
My Land Rover Defender has this as well.
jawilson2··on 98% isn't much
Ha, I had the same thought, if you actually know the history of Luddites vs the more colloquial usage of "someone who hates all technology."
jawilson2··on What Ozempic does to the gut-brain axis
I had the same experience, but with a strict keto diet, <20 net carbs / day. I started in 2014, and have maintained it more or less since. When I periodically stop it for a month or so, I get anxiety attacks, migraines, and obviously weight gain. So, I just don't stop it.
jawilson2··on I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
I don't understand why this is still confusing to people. The second "L" in LLM is language; these things are AWESOME at producing things that SOUND like language, including code. They have so much training data that it is almost always grammatically correct, and often makes sense. Extending this, it has obviously been trained on data containing phrases like "acromial undersurface" and "thin bursal fluid", and "coracromipal arch", in the context of shoulder injury and related imaging. BUT IT DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO DIAGNOSE ANYTHING. So, it SOUNDS like a radiologist or specialist, and might be in the ballpark of correct-ish-ness, but ultimately is a fancy Markov model.
jawilson2··on The Low-Tech AI of Elden Ring
> That said, I think that the target audience for the DLC was always people who thoroughly played through the game.

That's true, but it is strange that you get there and get early-game upgrade materials, like Smithing Stone 2, etc. It seems like they wanted to emphasize that the Scadutree Fragments are the important things for scaling, and not your Base Game level, but you already have to be pretty high level and upgraded to beat Mohg.

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